Anthony Rubino talks about the scrap metal business on Dec. 30, 2016, Rubino Brothers Scrap Iron and Metal, that his grandfather started back in 1900. Rubino, who is 63, runs the Stamford based business with his brother Frank. less

Anthony Rubino talks about the scrap metal business on Dec. 30, 2016, Rubino Brothers Scrap Iron and Metal, that his grandfather started back in 1900. Rubino, who is 63, runs the Stamford based business with ... more

Anthony Rubino walks through the yard as he talks about the scrap metal business on Dec. 30, 2016, Rubino Brothers Scrap Iron and Metal, that his grandfather started back in 1900. Rubino, who is 63, runs the Stamford based business with his brother Frank. less

Anthony Rubino walks through the yard as he talks about the scrap metal business on Dec. 30, 2016, Rubino Brothers Scrap Iron and Metal, that his grandfather started back in 1900. Rubino, who is 63, runs the ... more

Anthony Rubino talks about the scrap metal business on Dec. 30, 2016, Rubino Brothers Scrap Iron and Metal, that his grandfather started back in 1900. Rubino, who is 63, runs the Stamford based business with his brother Frank. less

Anthony Rubino talks about the scrap metal business on Dec. 30, 2016, Rubino Brothers Scrap Iron and Metal, that his grandfather started back in 1900. Rubino, who is 63, runs the Stamford based business with ... more

STAMFORD — The distinct sound of pulverizing metal has been heard in the city for more than 100 years.

Antonio Rubino began with a horse and wagon and a small shop in 1900 on Cardinal Place — a street that was eliminated when Interstate 95 was constructed.

His grandsons, Anthony, 63, and Frank, 52, have since taken over the family business — Rubino Brothers — that has become one of the state’s largest scrap metal recyclers and dealers.

More than a football field long and nearly as wide, the scrap yard and its office moved more than 60 years ago to the former Yale & Towne coal yard on Canal Street, just north of Fairway Market.

The thrum of diesel engines powering the cranes that swiftly grab cars or whatever else is dumped in the yard is eclipsed only by the crashing sound the bent objects make as the shiny steel tines drop the pieces onto the pile of debris below.

A gray minivan with straight body panels is thrown onto a 30-foot pile of twisted steel, ready to be grabbed by another crane and shoved onto a huge conveyor belt.

Through a second-floor window, Anthony Rubino’s attention is drawn to the vehicle.

“Guess what?” he asked. “You won’t know what it was in about 10 minutes.”

The belt leads to the mouth of the automobile shredder, an electric 2,000-horsepower whirling monster that uses hammers swinging at 600 revolutions per minute to pulverize the vehicles into fist-sized chunks of unrecognizable metal.

After being fed through powerful drum magnets and mysterious reverse magnets, every bit of steel the car once held falls from a smaller conveyor belt onto a barge docked behind the yard near the terminus of the Stamford Harbor’s East Branch.

Rubino is right. You can’t tell one car shred from another.

Rubino, who began working at the yard when he was 14 and full-time when he graduated college in 1975, said there are only a handful of metal scrapyards in the state that do more volume than his business.

Rubino said the plant can fill up to 50 of the 800-ton barges with shredded steel, that are nearly all shipped to Turkey to feed the Middle Eastern country’s appetite for steel to manufacture rebar for construction projects.

He said since Stamford has become a “corporate Mecca,” many newcomers wonder what goes on in his yard.

“For Stamfordites, Rubino’s is an institution, because we have been here for so long,” said Rubino, who said his company could be the city’s longest-running family-owned business. “For anybody else today, they probably say, ‘what is that place even doing there.’”